The American Numismatic Society Presents a Lecture with Dr. Shailen Bhandare on Tuesday, December 10, 2019: Between Text and Objects: Coinage and the “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea”
The Periplus is a Hellenistic Greek text that provides fascinating details and insights into the trans–Indian Ocean trade in the first century CE. Among its many other gifts, it supplies us with information about the nature and the extent of the role ancient coins played in this enterprise.
The lecture will highlight and contextualize the information in the Periplus by providing examples from the numismatic evidence. It will also broadly outline how object exchange across the Indian Ocean facilitated dissemination of art, cultural notions, and technologies across the wider Roman Empire world of East Africa, Arabia, and India.
Dr. Shailen Bhandare is Senior Asst. Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow of St Cross College and a member of the faculty of Oriental Studies. His curatorial responsibilities cover the coinages of the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East, and Paper Money. Dr. Bhandare is a regular contributor to international conferences and journals; his research interests focus mainly on contextualizing and historicizing Indian coins, with wide-ranging topics that include monetary history, art history, iconography, and archaeology. Among his recent publications are “Place, Space and Money in Maharashtra, c. 1750–1850: Some Insights”, in Spaces and Places in Western India Formations and Delineations, edited by Bina Sengar and Laurie Hovell McMillin, Routledge India, 2019; and “The Numismatic Chronology of Mathura and its Bearing on Art”, in Indology’s Pulse: Arts In Context: Essays Presented to Doris Meth Srinivasan in Admiration of her Scholarly Research, edited By Corinna Wessels-Mevissen and Gerd J.R. Mevissen, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2019.
Reservations are requested for the lecture at 6:00 P.M. and the preceding reception at 5:30. Please contact [email protected], or (212) 571-4470. ext. 117. Government-issued photo I.D. required for entry.
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About the ANS
The American Numismatic Society (ANS), organized in 1858 and incorporated in 1865 in New York State, operates as a research museum under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is recognized as a publicly supported organization under section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) as confirmed on November 1, 1970.
